This is virsh telling you that you can’t increase the number of vcpus to a number larger than what you started with.

Although virsh doesn’t support increasing the number of vcpus while the VM is running, you can change the number of vcpus if you’re willing to reboot the VM. All you need to to is to edit the virsh XML file with:

virsh edit <vm name>

Look for the line “vcpu placement” and increase the value to the number of vcpus that you want. I changed the vcpus from 2 to 8 here: